This is not what I sat down to write about this week. As a matter of fact, I have a whole little pile of research on another topic sitting here on my desk in my home office and ready to become a column of a totally different sort.
But as my fingers hit the keyboard, that old hymn "Count Your Blessings" started playing in my head, and the pesky thing would not go away, so there you are. Or rather here I am, counting the many blessings that have come my way over the course of my lifetime.
When you really think about it, everything we have, everything we experience, everything that exists around us is a blessing. In years gone by, the human race just has not always been blessed with the ease of life we have. In many other countries, that remains true. We are blessed with the right to choose what we wear at the beginning of each day. That may seem a small or insignificant blessing, but just think about it. What if you had to wear only black and be covered from head to toe always, even in this heat? Or what if you were only allowed to wear rags, nothing that approximated style, or face imprisonment or death for trying to rise above your caste?
To me, each time I open my eyes in the morning and am able to get out of bed under my own power, I am blessed. The taste of that first cup of coffee, the first breath of morning air as you step out the door into the new day, the feel of the sun on your skin, the smell of approaching rain, all are blessings beyond the imagining of many of the world's people today.
And of course, receiving blessings is not always the most gratifying thing. Donating your time to a local organization which helps those in need of something, whatever it may be, makes you a blessing to that person, and allows you to receive a blessing from the act itself. Giving blood, making monetary or physical donations, and other anonymous gestures are also blessings, because the amount of good that one simple gift can do and the number of people you can bless with those acts is almost infinite, even with a very small gift. All needs are, after all, requited from a bucket that must be filled beginning and continuing with one drop at a time.
And of course, children are always the ultimate blessing. We must have them to continue as a species. They are the extension of everything we have ever been and carry with them all we have known and become, whether they are our own children or the children of someone else whose lives we touch in one way or another. A lecture to a school classroom, a presentation at a club meeting or library, or just teaching a neighbor child to grow a squash plant passes on a blessing to them, and from that act you receive a blessing in return.
You notice I have not mentioned money except in the form of giving. My colleague Mark Brasfield wrote a very good column a few weeks ago about the importance of giving to God, and I am absolutely in agreement with him on that. However, like Mark, I do not think God really puts any importance on money at all, not on receiving it from us and not on our having it. And to be perfectly honest, from what I have seen, having money is more of a burden than a blessing, and in my experience God is as impressed with a sacrifice of time, labor and talent as he is with a sacrifice of money. You just can't get the satisfaction, or feel that closeness with God, from putting a check in the offering plate that you get from lifting your voice in song from the choir loft or swinging that hammer to repair a door, or walking up on that ladder in the sanctuary to change a light bulb.
Yes, blessings come to us in many shapes, sizes and forms, mostly as a result of us giving a blessing to someone else, but many just by being alive in a free country, in a community with as giving and generous a nature as Blytheville and Mississippi County, and by taking time to recognize them and thank the Lord for the blessings we have.
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